MEGA ERUPTION: RING OF FIRE is your usual TV movie disaster nonsense, dragged out for two parts for some reason which means that it's even slower than usual. It's an American production shot in Canada and it feels the usual disparate bunch of scientists and heroic types battling to stop a volcanic eruption which might well spell the end of the world for mankind. The story is the usual jumble of silly action scenes, CGI-aided disasters wreaking local havoc, and cheesy, wooden line readings from the underwhelming cast members. Plus you get your usual square-jawed hero fearlessly going on the suicide mission to save mankind. Terry O'Quinn (THE STEPFATHER) co-stars.

I'm partial to disaster flicks and I found this DVD at Redbox, although it's a TV Miniseries. It's in two parts, each one about 90 minutes long, which I felt was overly long for this film. Of course, it's not up to the quality of classics like the original "Poseiden Adventure" or "Towering Inferno", although it had some positives to it adding up to an average rating from me.Set in Oregon, it centers on an oil company, Trans Nova, using a supposedly environmentally safe laser drill to find oil in a naturally protected preserve. However, surreptitiously they're digging lower than legal depths and what they think is a vast oil reserve is actually a compressed magma (lava) deposit. After a whistleblower, who works at Trans Nova, reveals this to the head scientist overseeing the project Dr. Matthew Cooper (Michael Vartan) and to the aggressive environmentalist opposing the project, Emily Booth (Lauren Lee Smith) they project a disaster unless the well is immediately shut down.Even as livestock and wildlife begin to die, the head of the Trans Nova project Oliver Booth (Terry O'Quinn)--yes Emily's estranged father-- refuses to shut it down. You can guess what happens next--disaster with a huge volcanic eruption and the threat of triggering the Ring of Fire, whereby 75% of the world's volcanoes could be activated and erupt.In addition to the length of the movie, other drawbacks I thought were rather wooden acting and dialogue plus too many scientific technical terms as it went along. I thought overall the special effects were so/so, but at times very well conceived. On the positive side, I thought it maintained tension fairly well and the rescue and survival stories, as is the norm in these epic films, were quite well done, and at times could be moving and touching.

The only real point I want to make in this is to say that the endless field of out-of-focus foreground objects in front of almost every shot is a pointless, annoying distraction.The camera never stops gliding from side to side in a completely irrelevant manner.If the 'technique' is an attempt to give a fly-on-the-wall immediacy it fails completely.In spite of the bad technique, I did stick with it to the end of part one, and overall the storyline was interesting even if it was all very slow paced until the explosions started.I am not sure I will bother watching part two.

Not a bad plot and acting for a made-for-TV/Cable Miniseries, but the "shaky-cam" is WAY overdone and makes it a pain to watch. Almost every scene (at least the ones I could endure) used this technique, subsequently this was more of an "on in the background while I did other things movie". The constant jittering and jarring, lack of any real time focused on any actor or scene really detracted from the product. Certainly DOES NOT add realism. Too bad for us viewers. As far as scientific accuracy goes, seems about half of it was at least plausible. Most of it was pure Hollywood. The real problem nowadays is too many people are starting to think this stuff is real, as opposed to just fun entertainment.